The Syntax of Action

Abstract

(The Editors are pleased to have the opportunity of publishing this paper, which deals in general terms with the analysis of social interaction and its relation to the analysis of language, because they believe it has very significant implications for the study of classroom behaviour.) Social Psychology is a peculiar science. Its task is to describe what is already familiar, and to explain events whose genesis seems unproblematic. And yet it is not entirely pointless. Although we all know the basic facts of our everyday life, and we know that we know them, we are often at a loss when we try to relate them to a general structure. At the moment, for example, I know where I am and what I am doing. I even think I know why I am doing what I am doing, but when I consider the general question of how my activities are selected from moment to moment I can only think of vague generalisations. These generalisations are very often incorrect in that counter-examples exist, and they are certainly inadequate in that no amount of generalised introspection on my part will produce a set of principles capable of simulating my selection of activities from moment to moment. It is as if some systematic process were at work which can determine which courses of action are appropriate given a set of circumstances, but which cannot make its own procedures available for scrutiny. In short we can think of the orderliness of behaviour as the familiar product of an inaccessible process. In that case the central task of social psychology would be to accept the molecular insight we all share about those behavioural sequences and structures which are sensible, and to try to infer the kind of generative and interpretive processes which could give rise to such structure. Note that there is no question at this stage of discovering the actual process at work, but only of devising and classifying those icons (Harre, I975) which are generatively adequate. Clearly this is not an experimental issue. The point is not to discover the actions which follow from certain manipulable circumstances, but rather to create a system of generative operations or rules which will explicitly and formally reproduce our commonsense judgements about sensible combinations of circumstances and action. In that respect the problem is more akin to those of mathematics or generative linguistics than to those of the experimental natural sciences. We know as native social actors that a particular set of actions would be reasonable (or profitable or socially acceptable) in certain circumstances, just as a native speaker knows that certain strings of morphemes are well-formed (or semantically coherent) sentences. Similarly the native social actor and the native speaker share an ignorance of the general patterns to which their specific judgements conform. It is precisely this paradoxical derivation of specific judgement from tacit knowledge that generative linguistics seeks to explore. The counterpart in social psychology would be an attempt to produce a generative grammar of social action which would simulate a given